deep pictures ‘Growing Together’ – 52 postcards with coaching questions for team building & team development
€ 19.95
incl. VAT
The metaFox deep pictures combine 52 evocative picture cards and powerful coaching questions for adults in one postcard set. Specifically, the deep pictures ‘Growing Together’ help with team building, as well as discovering potential or solving conflicts in a group. We designed these image-question combinations to support group communication and motivation. This allows the team members to focus on its strengths or share what is unsaid, thus helping the group to “grow together”.
✔ Images depicting group and team membership
✔ Suitable questions about group work and group dynamics
✔ 52 picture cards to support team development
For
Group coaching, soft skills training, icebreaker, training, adult education, seminar, workshop, team building, leadership training, life coaching, therapy and counseling
Package Contents
- 52 coaching cards and an overview card with suggestions for how to use them
- A6 format (14.8 cm x 10.5 cm), front with matt lacquer for an elegant look and feel
- Stable 250g cardboard from 100% FSC certified sources
Description
metaFox deep pictures Growing Together
Conversation fuel towards psychologically safe teams
A team can benefit greatly when its members have a good awareness of group dynamics and group processes. At the same time, it is often difficult for individual group members to bring up these subtleties and state their needs.
What makes the content unique?
The photographs you’ll find in the deep pictures ‘Growing Together’ postcard set show people, groups and situations related to the topics of “working in a team” and “processes in groups”. We curated these picture cards to represent metaphors for progress in a team or successful cooperation, as well as diversity and conflicts. The coaching questions we selected to match these pictures aim to shed light on possibly unconscious group processes and to support team development. In this way, ‘Growing Together’ serves as a coaching tool that enables people to “grow together”.
The deep pictures Card Decks in action
The deep pictures Card Decks combine powerful images and coaching questions in a deck of 52 picture cards. The theme “Growing Together” are specifically built as coaching cards for teams. They can be a valuable tool for effective coaching and to help conversations emerge. You can try different methods:
Association cards - a trigger for conversation
When starting your retrospective, your supervision or a strategic meeting, make space for people to discuss team processes they see. Spread the cards, images facing up, in front of your team. Invite people to “take a card which is your personal metaphor for where we are as a team.” Let people share their image card to visually represent the group’s state and illustrate the coaching journey. The reflection cards support the team discussion and the group process with metaphors – as a coaching tool and communication aid.
A facilitation tool for appreciation and feedback
Enhance your coaching skills by using these coaching cards in a team-building exercise: with small groups of 3-5 people, and the images spread out openly, let everyone select one card each to be given to all group members. Every participant will end up with cards as appreciative feedback from everyone else in their group. Read more on this method here.
Coaching cards for managers - questions to dig deep
In order to uncover, address, and resolve specific processes within the team, you can also pre-select questions from the back of the cards. Choose a set of questions which feels relevant to the group and its state. Invite your team members to choose which of the questions, arranged in your selection, they consider most relevant to discuss now. In this way, you can coach your team in an organic and immediate manner and even without a lot of coaching skills.
Accessories and other decks
What makes a great team?
A well-performing team will hold a number of qualities, such as trust, commitment, mutual support, patience, flexibility and complementing skill sets. Different people will consider certain qualities to be more important than others. In its ‘Project Aristole’ Google researchers found ‘psychological safety’, i.e. the team members’ ability to “feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other” the most important quality of successful teams.
In a team offering psychological safety, group members feel comfortable to ask any question and bring up controversial topics. In order to get there, it helps to frame work as learning and approach it with curiosity, according to Project Aristotle and organizational behavioural scientist Amy Edmondson.
Team building, team games and group work can also contribute to psychological safety. Coaching cards, such as the deep pictures, can serve as a communication aid. They facilitate getting to know each other and enable a group coaching process in a team meeting – this leads the group dynamics step by step towards psychological safety.
The Dynamics of team development
Every group of people will go through certain processes throughout its life span. Researchers have come up with various different group development models over time to describe these. In the following, we briefly present the Firo B model, named after the California seminar room where it was originally developed by Will Schutz in the late 1950s. John Whitmore, co-creator of the GROW Coaching Model, presents the model in its most simplistic form. Having only three stages, we consider this the most applicable version:
Inclusion
In its early stages, a group determines if they (feel like they) belong together. The individual members’ needs for acceptance and fear of rejection are guiding behaviours to a large extent. Therefore, most will act carefully and watch out for future norms, set by (explicit or implicit) group leaders and fellow members. This is where displaying openness, curiosity and vulnerability, as described above, can help to spark psychological safety.
Assertion
With an increasing number of people feeling included, the dynamic of individual assertion will emerge. Group members will express power and mark territory - or in business speech “establish roles and functions”. People try themselves out and competition can lead to great productivity, sometimes at the expense of others. Even though this process might be exhausting at times, the stage of assertion can be considered productive and valuable for the team’s development.
Cooperation
With roles and responsibilities already established, some teams make it to different degrees of this third stage. In the previous phases, energy was turned inward to the emotional needs of dependent people (inclusion) and towards competition between independent members (assertion). Once the cooperation stage is reached, energy can now be directed to a common outward goal. To achieve it, the now interdependent team members can support each other even on a bad day.
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